No more shackles: single-player StarCraft 2 goes full-bore

The single-player StarCraft 2 has been torn from its multiplayer brother and …

More deliberate missions are also included

A cinema shows a Protoss character giving an item to a human character (and yes, I'm being vague on purpose) and inside that item is a memory—a memory of something that's very important in the world of StarCraft. By clicking on the item in the hub section, you'll get a chance to play through the mission as a Protoss character. It's an elegant way to sneak in some Protoss gameplay among the Terran campaign, and apparently we can expect more Protoss missions of this type.

The Protoss will be playable in the Terran campaign, the Zerg will not

You begin with one character who can teleport limited distances. He's also cloaked throughout the mission, and has to use a skill called Void Prison to take out detector units so he can sneak through certain areas undisturbed. You'll gain a few more units in the course of the mission, but for all intents and purposes it's almost a stealth mission. The game autosaves at multiple points throughout the mission, which makes failure a little less scary if you'd like to play around.

Things go badly in this section, and you're given a very limited amount of time to escape to your ship. The last part of the mission turns into a mad rush to the end of the level, where you'll be chased by a scary amount of Zerg enemies. The feel and pacing of this mission is very different than anything else I've played in the game, and it's a nice change of pace.

Harvesting resources, against the clock

The third mission sees a very shady character paying you to go down to a Protoss world to harvest a rare gas known as Terrazine. After thanking Gygax Blizzard for not call the gas "Notgettinmuchofit" in the Cameronian tradition, I took the mission and headed down to the planet. The briefings in the game, along with the video, give you a good idea of what you're in for; presentation has taken a giant leap forward from the first game.

So here's the challenge of this map: you have to send SCVs to the shrines where the Protoss are harvesting the gas, and take the canisters for yourself. Are you starting to get the sense that the Protoss kind of have the right to be pissed off at the humans yet? It takes time for the SCV to unhook the canister, meaning you have to defend the units while they work. The Protoss are going to do everything they can to keep you from this resource.

That doesn't just mean attacking your units when you're grabbing the gas supply, it also means sending units to the other supplies to cap the sources of the gas. You'll be told when a gas source is being capped, and if you don't stop the Protoss, that gas supply is shut down completely. It almost feels like a game of domination: you have to control these supply points until you grab the resource, and if the Protoss begin to gain control, you have to destroy the enemy units to keep the source of the gas available.

Fighting over the source of Terrazine. The other purple dots on the map are sources of the gas.

The level design and the scripting here is brilliant. You have to do multiple things at once: defend your units harvesting gas, keep the gas supplies open, and deliver the canisters back to your base. You'll be running all over the map with your units, while of course defending your base and creating more forces, until you've collected enough of the gas. It's yet another game mechanic that makes the level feel unique.

Dustin Browder

"I never felt like it was a good teaching tool to begin with, it was always kind of a lie. We wanted to believe it—that if you could beat the single-player you could go online and play well. But it teaches you all sorts of bad habits." There's a risk with the Zerg that players won't have a good handle on things—Protoss is given a mini-campaign in the single-player of StarCraft 2—but Browder told us that with the multiple levels of AI and co-op versus the computer, there are plenty of "safe" places to learn the game. The challenge modes also help build your skills.

"The core philosophy has always been [that] we can do anything we want with the solo, and we should! We should make solo for solo, and multiplayer for multiplayer, and that will be better for both instead of jamming them together," he told us. "As we got into the development we got more and more creative and got cool ideas, things that would never work in multiplayer, and soon we were like, 'Whoa! What is that crazy thing? Is that a Thor regenerating with an area-effect cannon on its back?'" He pointed out the e-sport element in multiplayer, and how careful they have to be with that aspect of the game. In solo play? "Whatever man, those rules are gone. (Laughs) We can have a lot more fun. Hopefully it's more fun for the fans."

Every level of research forces you to make a choice between two upgrades

While many of these things won't be in the multiplayer portion of the game, they are available in the level editor and the creation tools. In one map we played, you use a mining laser to drill into a Protoss temple, and Browder told me even that it is available for modders. "You can create laser drill wars. You have one and so does your opponent. You can phase each other into oblivion. That would be cool! But that's a gimme, that's an easy one, riffing on single-player mechanics." Playing with the single-player mechanics—the zombie hordes from one mission, the lava that sneaks up on players from another—"That's going to be child's play. I'm excited about all-new games that no one has thought of yet. The tower defense game type, I could be wrong, but I believe it was largely invented by our fans using our engine. Defense of the Ancients, I think, was largely invented by our fans. I have no idea what they're going to do with StarCraft 2. We're going to give them the tools. It's very exciting to see what the fans will do. It's a little more complicated, but it's way more powerful than what we've given them before. We don't know what's going to happen."